Question

I’m trying to find the jQuery equivalent of this JavaScript method call:

document.addEventListener('click', select_element, true);

I’ve gotten as far as:

$(document).click(select_element);

but that doesn’t achieve the same result, as the last parameter of the JavaScript method – a boolean that indicates whether the event handler should be executed in the capturing or bubbling phase (per my understanding from http://www.quirksmode.org/js/events_advanced.html) – is left out.

How do I specify that parameter, or otherwise achieve the same functionality, using jQuery?

Answer 1

Not all browsers support event capturing (for example, Internet Explorer versions less than 9 don’t) but all do support event bubbling, which is why it is the phase used to bind handlers to events in all cross-browser abstractions, jQuery’s included.

The nearest to what you are looking for in jQuery is using bind() (superseded by on() in jQuery 1.7+) or the event-specific jQuery methods (in this case, click(), which calls bind() internally anyway). All use the bubbling phase of a raised event.